An effective design team requires a multitude of diverse skills, and it’s impossible for any one individual to possess them all. So, how do you go about putting together a team that’s balanced, powerful and can work effectively with other teams? What is the right mixture of junior and senior practitioners? What skills, soft and hard, do you need to design and deliver outstanding products and services that support meaningful outcomes?

In this workshop, we’ll take a look at how to assess the skills of our colleagues (as well as our own) to best shape, inspire and lead a design team that works together (and stays together). A team where more experienced practitioners thrive and more junior ones are supported, mentored and enabled to grow, and where complementarity and teamwork are the foundations of success.

You will learn:

• A different point of view on design leadership, and ready to build, motivate, grow and keep design teams happy
• Understanding of the traits of an effective design team
• Tips and techniques on how to hire, motivate and keep design teams happy
• Methods and tools (and a bit of science) to assess your team’s skill set, create development plans and support performance.

Ever been handed a project or had someone come to you with an idea that immediately made you think – “This is probably a waste of time.” What if, instead of taking on the project, you first spent a short period of time investigating the merit of the idea?

This workshop is a mix of illustrative stories about projects that were stopped, much to the relief to the businesses, as well as practical advice for helping you find out if that idea is any good. What if spending $20,000 to make that early decision meant avoiding spending millions to build something no one would want enough to justify the money, time, and effort?

After attending this workshop you will be familiar with how to promote this approach internally to your company and externally to clients, how to structure a good Discovery project, and how deliver results that build confidence in making a go or no-go decision.

You will learn to:

• Understand how to determine if a stand-alone Discovery project makes sense
• Persuade others – your project team, your company, your clients – about the merits of a stand-alone Discovery project
• Structure and how to carry out a stand-alone Discovery project
• Deliver the good news and the bad news.

Design is being increasingly applied to “wicked problems” – problems that, because of numerous and complex interdependencies, are difficult (if not impossible) to solve (think homelessness, obesity, etc.).

While helpful, applying “standard” human-centered design strategies to address such problems tend to fall far short of the mark. Why is this? What is it about wicked problems that make human-centered design inadequate in and of itself?

As designers, we’re well positioned to make a meaningful difference in the world, and we want to do it well.

This workshop starts by exploring common characteristics of these types of problems and the implications for projects to support them.

You will learn:

• To explore how conventional approaches to human-centered design need to be questioned, altered and extended to be most impactful for wicked problems
• To participate in questioning our tried and true methods and will experience examples of what such alterations and extensions mean.
• To get a sense of some important considerations for how to be more effective when designing for social impact.

Design Research uses ethnography to help designers study the ways we make sense of ourselves, each other and the ways in which we live, work and play. It helps designers understand the why and how of human behaviour, and gives us the tools to communicate that understanding to others.

This workshop will introduce you to ethnographic research methods, the principles that guide an ethnographic approach and will show you practical ways of applying these methods on your projects.

You will learn:

• The basics of ethnography and how it is used
• Research methods and their connection to design
• How to apply research methods on a design project
• How to use ethnographic data to tell stories within your organisation and make a case for change.